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Life & Adventures on Book Tour: Part II

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26079465894_f2c0f36718_z Greetings from Denver! Weeks II and III of the Born for This tour are coming to an end, and it’s been a great experience overall.

For the most part, it’s been a non-stop experience. At one point I did 14 days in a row with only one day off from events or travel or both (usually both, since I typically do an event in the evening and then travel to the next city the following day).

Oddly enough, I only felt tired on the rare days of rest or during periods of lesser intensity. Maybe the lesson is: when you’re going non-stop, don’t stop. 😃


Dream Trip Student Earns 21,000 Points from Taking Free Surveys

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Last year I co-taught a 28-day course on how to make your dream trip a reality. Throughout the course we heard story after story of people earning hundreds of thousands of miles and points. That was great, but what’s happening now is even better: we’re hearing lots of great stories of how students are using their miles and points.

As I say often, earning miles is great, but putting them toward free travel is much better. 😃

Today I saw a great example of how someone earned a significant number of points without applying for credit cards. The headline says it all: she earned 22,000 Hilton HHonors points by completing online surveys.


Fun Project: The 2016-2017 “Get to Work Book” Is Now Out!

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IMG_8127_copy Link: The Get to Work Book

Here's a fun project that a wish I’d made it myself. But even though I didn’t, some very good friends of mine did. It's like a journal or a planner, but better—and here's how the creator describes it:

GET TO WORK BOOK® is a daily planner + goal setting workbook designed to help you make progress on your big goals by taking things one day at a time. While (sadly) it can't do your work for you, every inch of it was thoughtfully designed to help you get to work.


Dream Jobs Don’t Always Have Glamorous Beginnings

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Rosemary3 Rosemary Behan has crafted a career in journalism that allows her to travel the world. In this profile, she shares how she got started—and how you can still break into the changing world of travel writing.

People often ask me how I became a travel journalist, and the honest answer is, by accident. I started at the Daily Telegraph, reading and replying to reader letters (most of them complaints about travel companies and holidays gone wrong), and my first assignment was to write about London’s worst hotels. Not a glamorous beginning, but it eventually led to a job as travel news editor for the paper.


There’s Always a New Trick to Learn

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"The great thing about a world record is that it gives meaning to a mundane task.

I don’t worry too much about people emulating me because people who have the get-up-and-go to do something like this usually have the common sense to know when something's going wrong.! It's a good time to be an inventor. If people want to learn to do something, they can easily get the information where before it was quite hard.

There’s always a new trick to learn. There’s always something you can do bigger and better."


“I’m not optimistic because our problems are small…”

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Why build a clock that lasts for 10,000 years? Because the future is always getting shorter and shorter.

“Everybody was doing things faster and faster. I needed to slow down, stretch out, and think on a different time scale.

Any engineer wants to build something that lasts. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to build. From the beginning I wanted to make a little model of the clock, and then make a bigger one and a bigger one. I finally realized the clock couldn’t go in a building—it had to be in a mountain.

I’m very optimistic about the future. I’m not optimistic because our problems are small … I’m optimistic because our capacity to deal with problems is great."


One Man’s Quest to Draw 900,000 Buildings in New York City

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It’s difficult to pin down the exact number of buildings in New York City. One source estimates 860,000, another source pins the number at 1,053,713. Whatever the number, we’ll know eventually, thanks to Australian-born James Gulliver Hancock, who has made it his mission to draw every single one of them.

When I moved to New York City, I really wanted to get to know Manhattan better, beyond a traditional tourist experience. New York was my new home, and I needed a way to understand it. Drawing every building is my version of a diary of my experience in the city—and it doubles as my own personal map. When I walk by the buildings I’ve drawn, it’s like seeing old friends.
James8


Joy, Money, and Flow: The Three Qualities of Purposeful Work

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*My brand-new book, Born for This, is all about helping you find the work you were meant to do. This series explores some of these lessons.

Lesson: There’s more than one possible path. Use the Joy-Money-Flow model to find the best one.

There are plenty of things you could do with your career, but the people who are most successful have found the perfect combination of joy, money, and flow. They’ve won the career lottery by finding this combination—and they don’t have to choose between their money and their life.


Life and Adventures on Book Tour: Part I

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Greetings from Orange County, California! I started my tour earlier this week and have been to “only” four cities so far, but the pace will pick up a lot starting next Wednesday.

In this new series, I’ll share a few highlights from my stops. I'll also write some general notes about the process of touring itself. Lots of people have asked about the behind-the-scenes process of putting together a major cross-country tour, and I’m always happy to share what I’ve learned.


To Succeed in the New, New Economy, Don’t Mail It In

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Ever since I wrote about The New, New Economy, I’ve been having lots of interesting conversations with people about it. Readers have also asked that I share more specific recommendations for “what works” now that a lot of online marketing strategies feel increasingly outdated.

I still stand by the general assertion that building relationships and producing quality work are the most important predictors of success, far more than any tactic or “hack.”

As a good way to illustrate this, last week I recorded a podcast for The Art of Charm, founded and hosted by Jordan Harbinger. I’ve known of Jordan for a while and we’ve emailed a bit, but I don’t think we’d ever spoken before. The hour-long conversation covered a lot of ground, and I was especially struck by something he said in the beginning.


“3 Encounters That Changed My Life”: How a Corporate Employee Gained a New Perspective through Travel

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Clelia3 After enduring a life of “glamor and nonsense” (her words) for six years, Clelia Mattana decided to follow an inner calling and travel the world solo.

Imagine this typical scene on the London Underground: A business man reading a newspaper, a teenage boy damaging his eardrums listening to loud music on his headphones, a girl painting her nails while playing on her phone. They all regard conversation as a contagious disease.

When I was London, I was exactly like them — and I didn’t even know it until I started traveling. On the road, I learned that travel doesn’t necessarily make me a better person. We've all read touching stories on how traveling helps you find your true self, opens your mind, and changes you. This is certainly true some of the time, but I’ve learned that traveling can also bring out the worst parts of my personality.


A New Journey Begins: “Born for This” Is Now Available!

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Link: BornforThisBook.com

More than eight years ago (whoa) I started writing this blog, The Art of Non-Conformity. I wanted to chronicle my adventures around the world and support other people with big dreams.

But the journey actually begin more than ten years before that, when I first started working for myself. I wasn’t a good employee, having been fired from just about every job that I didn’t walk away from after a few weeks. My motivations at the time weren’t very high-level: I simply wanted to earn money to support my lifestyle.

As the years went by, I learned more about entrepreneurship as a way to change the world. I spent a few years living on a hospital ship deployed to West Africa. I started a quest to visit every country on the planet. And as I wrote, and then as I began hosting events and supporting offline communities, I gradually grew into the work I felt born to do. So I wrote a book about how you can find or create the same for yourself.

Born for This, just released today and available wherever books are sold, provides the answer.

You’ll learn how to:
  • Hack the job of your dreams within a company or organization by making it work for you
  • Find your ideal work and your ideal working conditions
  • Create plans that will allow you to take smarter career risks and “beat the house” every time
  • Start a profitable “side hustle” and earn extra cash on top of your primary stream of income
  • Escape the prison of working for someone else and build a mini-empire as an entrepreneur
  • Become a rock star at any creative endeavor by creating a loyal base of fans and followers


What Time Should You Arrive at the Airport?

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I’m unusual in that I love airports. I'll regularly arrive 2-3 hours in advance of my flight, sometimes even at a small airport without a lounge. There’s just something about being around the bustle of people in motion and aircraft on the tarmac that I find reassuring.

But let’s say that you’re a normal person. Assuming you don’t want to live as I do, when should you arrive at the airport before a flight?

Two simple guidelines will help.


“Problems Don’t Define a Place, People Do”: A Journey into Uganda

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With NPR news, Instagram, and Netflix documentaries at our fingertips, it’s easy to think we understand a place, even if we’ve never spent much time there. Amy Carst and her family moved to Uganda for four months, and they realized the Africa they’d heard about wasn’t the Africa they came to know.

It is 5:30 in the morning. I’m sitting under my mosquito netting with a cup of strong coffee while a preacher’s sermon is projected in the local Luganda language from a nearby church. When we arrived in Uganda, I was annoyed by this loud, peculiar, predawn disturbance. But now, it’s background noise, much like a window fan in summer or water flowing down a backyard stream.


This Short Video Reminds Me Why I Travel

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I can be a pretty jaded traveler, so I watch videos like these to remind myself of the magic.

This one is from a summer trip to Dubai and Indonesia. Notice the commonalities and the differences of the two places, which are both fascinating in their own ways.

Do I ever get tired of travel? Sure.

Do I ever want to stop?Absolutely not.